BATTLE AS DIMENTSIA, A TEMPORARY INSANITY"

From: "Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War" Gerald F. Linderman

“Courage also helped to insulate the soldier against the trauma of combat.  Its code ordained that the soldier react to the sights of the battlefield with sang froid, the ability to remain unmoved by the horrors of war. Consider the manner in which John Esten Cooke chose to establish the bravery of John Pelham, the Confederate artillerist: “He saw guns shattered. . .or men torn to pieces, without exhibiting any signs of emotion. . . the ghastliest spectacle of blood and death left his soul unmoved—his stern will unbent.

"Similarly, when a Northern volley struck at head level a line of Mississippians and they lay eyes open, faces bleached by “a sickly summer rain” and foreheads “stained with ooze and trickle of blood,” Stonewall Jackson passed by, looking long, but did not shudder. “Not a muscle quivered,” Stiles admiringly reported. “He was the ideal of concentration—imperturbable, resistless.” To tremble might signal horror, and to feel horror was to yield to despicable effeminacy.

“Given particularly the kinship of courage and godliness, courage could hardly be exercised by evil men or incorporated in an evil cause.  If courage was a universal virtue of constant quality—and all soldiers thought it was—it became difficult to deny that demonstrations of courage were proofs of an ennobling purpose.  Should the foe then prove courageous, a basis for mutual respect and sympathy would be created.

“Those who assaulted Missionary Ridge were described as “completely and frantically drunk with excitement.” It was likened to a dream state.  Poague recalled that in his first battle, actually a Shenandoah Valley skirmish, a “curious mental exaltation seized us; an inward questioning as to whether it was all a dream.”  At times both dream and intoxication entered the description.  When Ripley charged Confederate guns in Peninsula fighting during the fall of 1864, ‘it was a dream, so great was the intoxication of the excitement.” Some felt it as a state of physical abnormality: seized by “the fever of the rush”; “gone wild with battle fever”; “wild with uncontrollable delirium”; delirious with . . . wild excitement.” It became even a species of dementia, a temporary insanity: the charge raising “one mad desire” to trample down everything."